Survival of old atDNA segments

[Frederator]

Comment removed for derisive comments towards FTDNA staff.

[Frederator]

Well, I've kicked the tires, and I think I'm well on my way to straightening out the demographic information.

The key seems to be threading the path between what I think are some fairly reliable data points:

-The Jewish Encylcopedia's census figures for 1897-1901
-Two...

[Frederator]

Ugh. This is going to be painful. I had assumed that such an intensively studied population as Ashkenazi Jews would have developed some clear consensus about recent demographic history at this point, but this seems to be far from the case. That 400,000 estimate for the Ashkenazi population in 1772...

[Frederator]

I'm not sure I fully grasped the importance of some of Khazaria's observations until just now. I think that the points he's raised will require me to significantly alter my model, but maybe not in the way I first suspected. I got caught up in the discussion of the ethnically mixed origins of this...

[Frederator]

Okay, I think I see your point now, but I'm not sure. Are you saying that I am applying my model incorrectly by moving from an a-historical effective genetic population figures to a very historical, census-derived figure to determine the likely # of individuals within a modern atDNA donor's pool of...

[Frederator]

I think we're coming at this from two entirely different perspectives. As one should expect with a topic as complex as this.

I'm a generalist, not particularly interested in defining every narrow subset of this population. I'm only interested in the broadest, most commonly accepted, least-restrictive...

[Frederator]

I'm sure that literal population size was much larger, as I believe you imply. But since I'm only interested in this demography in relation to the atDNA matches registered among living donors, I'm pretty sure the effective population is the statistic I want to focus on.

So now that I think...

[Frederator]

Thanks for the tip.

This summary is very brief, and therefore necessarily ambiguous on some important points. But I think it strongly implies that this effective 350 person founder population was ethnically mixed in the way you are cautioning me.


"Further, that...

[Frederator]

This discussion is a little misleading and I'm not sure it has any practical value. Now that I review the substance of my calculation, what I'm really saying is that these ratios apply to the entire current population, including people who have not even performed atDNA testing. There is probably no...

[Frederator]

I'm sure this is a controversial estimate, and at this point I don't really have enough understanding of the methodology to have much of an opinion on its trustworthiness, but at least this study offers data that I can use to improve my model's structure.

https://www.livescience.com/47...

[Frederator]

Sorry. Here are those charts. I got the display parameters wrong on one of them, and the edit function wouldn't display the new copies correctly.





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[Frederator]

Well, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Although I'm pretty happy (so far) with the rest of the reasoning and implementation of my calculation, I have to admit that this last bit, simply taking 2 to the power of the # of generations between some arbitrarily determined cM threshold, is not...

[Frederator]

Recombination is an extremely variable process, but we do have reliable information about the statistical averages and standard deviations to make some kind of educated guess about how much of a given ancestor's atDNA should remain intact among their descendants worldwide at a given number of generations....

[Frederator]

Unfortunately, I think it's just too late. The company may tell you differently, but how could you ever believe them? The president of this company flagrantly broke their contract with the customers and treated our data like it was his personal property. As soon as I found out about this myself,...

[Frederator]

Aboslutely. At the bare minimum. Anything else would just look like a cheap ploy to imply some type of consent where none was given or even asked for....